


Tell Yourself, I Am Alive

by desperately_human



Category: Life on Mars & Related Fandoms, Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: 2x08, I extrapolated a lot from the graveyard scene in 2x08, Suicidal Themes, You Decide, ruth tyler pov, this fic makes no comment on the reality of 1973, this is a sad one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-24 05:22:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17698451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/desperately_human/pseuds/desperately_human
Summary: They asked her, "Is there any reason why Sam would step out of his car in the middle of an overpass?"  And she didn't know the reason, but she wasn't exactly surprised. There had always been the silences, a hand on the hot stovetop, picking fights with older boys and letting himself be hit. There had been the coach crash and the terrible blankness in his eyes. She had always been losing him.





	Tell Yourself, I Am Alive

2006: She wasn’t surprised, exactly, when she got the call. One of her son’s co-workers, brisk, but trying to be gently. Sam was in the hospital. Not awake. They didn’t know the damage yet. There was an…automobile accident. And in the pause, Ruth heard the question that was coming, closed her eyes against it.  


“Mrs. Tyler, can you think of any reason that Sam would get out of his car in the middle of an overpass?” The voice kept on, muffled words ringing in her ears: he shouldn’t really be asking, he’s sorry, but he just doesn’t get it. No, she thought or maybe said, I don’t know the reason. I don’t know why. I’ve never known why.  


She sat by his bed and waited, and talked, and didn’t give up hope. She wavered when the doctors said there was no chance, that the kindest things she could do was turn off his life support. But then he smiled, and she remembered every time he had smiled, every time she had seen him wake up from the shell of a person he sometimes became and act like her son again. She prayed to God and promise that she would love her wide-eyed, fiercely mortal, melancholy son, this boy who always looked like he could see something more than she could, and she would never, ever ask for more.  


She waited in the scratchy chair beside the bed, and in the dark hours of the night when all the televisions had been switched off and all the drama was happening in other wings, and her son battled for his life in silence, she thought about Sam stepping out of his car into the road. And she let herself remember.  


1973: She hadn’t known how to tell him, had been fretful and distant on the drive home from the wedding and has busied herself in the kitchen as soon as they got home. How could she tell him what his father had done? How could she explain that they wouldn’t ever be a family, all together, ever again? But when she finally sat him down in the living room, finally looked at her five-year-old son and really saw him, she knew that her word wouldn’t matter. There was something...wrong in his wide, dark eyes. There was still dirt on his knees, and under his fingernails, though he had scrubbed his hands red. He had been missing, she had forgotten.  


Where had he been? Silence. She had to tell him something. No curiosity, her curious little boy. No questions. His father was going away, had gone away, would have to go away for a long time. Wouldn’t be back. Sam just nodded, then got up and went to his room. Ten minutes later, when she had got control of her breathing and went to check on him, he was asleep.  


He had always been quiet always serious, but for months after that he didn’t laugh. Didn’t want to play with his friends. She was caught up in her own grief, in the overwhelming realization that she no longer had a husband. But she watched him once playing football, staring off into the trees and letting a ball knock him square in the face. He started talking again, short sentences and once “Is it ever okay to hurt someone?”  


She tried to be honest with him, “when you’re a policeman you might have to hurt someone, to stop them from hurting other people.,” but he shook his head.  


There were the nightmares, too, dreams when he shouted “no, dad, stop!” and other dreams about the girl on the television, when he would wake and throw himself into her arms and cry, “I don’t want to stay with her.”  


One day she picked him up from school, her sweet, peaceful boy beat black and blue, and the teacher told her that he had picked a fight with some older boys. Mocking and sniping until they lashed out, and then he just stood there and let himself be hit. The terrible blankness, which had receded a little in the months since his dad left, back again in his eyes. Sleeping all afternoon, lights on in the middle of the night staring at a striped football scarf. Things she tried to forget.  


Because it got better. Slowly, over the months, fewer blank days, more smiles. He was never quit the carefree child he had been before, but who could expect that. He was seeing friends, he was laughing. She had found a new flat, a better job. They were getting over it. He was getting over it.  


1981: He was okay, they said, it was very important that she understand that. He was okay, but her son had been involved in a coach crash. He had only broken his arm. Could she speak to him? She had better come in. The kind-faces doctor tried to pull her aside when she arrived, but she was seeing Sam and no one would get in her way.  


Her child sat propped up by pillows, his arm in a sling, looking distant and glazed. She hugged him, and it must have hurt but he didn’t react, just turned to her with something wrong in his eyes and a mouth that didn’t quite know how to smile and sat straight, frozen. She spoke and he didn’t answer, didn’t even blink. And for a moment she was twenty-six and he was five and she was taking a deep breath to tell him something he already knew, but the doctor came in and she remembered that was then, and now he was twelve and the same thing was wrong in his eyes. Then she was screaming, “Sam, Sam,” and the kind-faced doctor was pulling her away and saying, “He’s just...closed down. There’s nothing physically wrong, other than his arm, but he’s. He’s not responding.” He had a gentle voice, she thought, they always did.  


“I’m sorry to tell you this, Mrs. Tyler, and I’m not sure exactly what it means, but we have witnesses to the accident.” He paused, what did that mean? A crowded street, surely people had seen. But what a harsh word, witnesses, a word Vic’s friends used, and not kindly. “They said, all of them said that Sam saw the coach coming. He was looking right at it when he stepped out.” The world went white for a minute, all the lights in the building up too high, then she realized she should still be listening. “…done anything like this before? Mrs. Tyler?”  


“I,” her throat hurt, her eyes hurt, “I don’t know.” Had he? Had he? The silence when his father left. The other, smaller silences. He studied harder this year, read his policing manuals. He didn’t see much of his friends anymore, he was outgrowing them, he had always been mature. Sometimes smart, wise kids prefer their own company. But there was the time he had put one hand flat on the stovetop and hadn’t moved it until she screamed. The days he lay silent on the bed, not sleeping but staring at nothing with glazed eyes. Cuts and bruises that she thought—hoped—all children got.  


A week after the crash, he started talking. “I don’t remember what happened. I can’t feel anything.” The doctors worried, they kept him, they brought in psychiatrists and drugs and nothing really changed. He was still Sam, but quiet, flat-eyed, she-would-not-say-broken Sam. “I’m fine, mum. Don’t worry. I don’t feel bad.”  


There was a doctor, a phenomenally expensive child specialist who they only saw once, who told Sam, “every day, when you wake up, every day tell yourself ‘I am alive.’” She asked Sam about it in the car and he had nodded his serious nod and said, “I’ll try.”  


She begged him, the day the sling came off, “promise me you won’t ever do something like that again. Please, Sam, promise me.” He had cried and they had cried a held each other and it was only later she realized that he hadn’t promised.  


Eventually things got better, like last time, agonizingly slowly but then one day, better. He was so different from his father.  


2006: She knows from the moment he got up from his bed the day she’d been praying for. She sees it in his eyes and doesn’t want to see, and he’s gotten better at hiding his feelings. But he doesn’t want to talk to anyone, and his eyes glaze over reading the paper, hearing the news, and he doesn’t laugh. When he first leaves the hospital she stays with him, and hears his shouts in the night and knows the nightmares have started again. She lies in the dark, wanting to comfort him but so scared that she won’t be able to. He tells her, “I was in a place, and I woke up every day in this place and I told myself “I am alive!’” and she’s too afraid to ask if he’s alive now. If you look too closely at something it might break. He says he made a promise, and it breaks her heart not to ask him for a promise for her. To stay and never leave again. He can’t promise that and she won’t make him.  


When the hospital calls again, and she sits by her son’s side just like she did months before, and watches the machines breathing for him, and they tell her what he’s done, she isn’t exactly surprised. She thinks about the fights at school, the burned hands, the coach crash, his father, all the times that could be so easily glossed over. But she knows her son, and he had never belonged to her. They ask her to talk to him, but she won’t beg him to come back.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been quietly working on this fic for a while, but it's still mostly first-draft material and I always love feedback.  
> I'm not SAYING that 1973 doesn't exist or that Sam is dead at the end, it's just a very 2006-centric fic and Sam stops being in Ruth's life at the end of 2x08.


End file.
